Boards

GAS box set for me (if I ever ran one.) Probably about the right duration (4 hours!) and not intrusive enough to put me off. And actually probably the only chance I'll get to listen to the whole thing again.

I mostly listened to Girl Talk, which I'd been listening to a lot at the time and has a nice pace to it. Didn't start listening to halfway through and stopped late on as I was rather enjoying the atmosphere.

Like the poster ^ I have a running playlist but not sure whether I'll use it next time (just over a month away, so underprepared!). Always like listening to the likes of Fucked Up and Dananananaykroyd when running so might go for something of that ilk.

Part of me thinks I shouldn't listen to anything at all but it is a good distraction from just how bloody far you've got left to go!

I've done one (London) and I left the headphones behind, even though I trained with them on for most of the time. If there will be crowds for the duration, don't bother with them. Otherwise I actually find spoken word stuff better than music... maybe that's just me.

The reason being, it's difficult to predict how you're going to be feeling for different parts of the race and when you need a mental push, ambient techno isn't going to cut it, but whilst you're in a comfortable groove, you don't want something to push your adrenaline further than you can cope with.

The playlist was about 10 hours long, so if a song came on that wasn't doing it for me, I could skip instantly and still have enough to not need to look at or program my media player before the end.

It's a mentally straining event as well as physical ("why don't I just stop now?") which could have anything from rain to sun, you could trip up on the way, or not realise the effect of the crowd. In other words, just have something flexible, don't expect to have the perfect playlist created to coincide with your own predictions of for your expected finish time.